


Time syzygy

by laughingpineapple



Category: Pyre (Video Game)
Genre: Adapting To The Past, Downside ending, Established Relationship, Gen, M/M, Stranded In The Past, Telepathy, Time Travel, catharsis maybe, meeting a historical figure, mentions of Soliam/Gol, mentions of Volfred/Tariq
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-08
Updated: 2021-02-08
Packaged: 2021-03-18 20:42:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28873272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughingpineapple/pseuds/laughingpineapple
Summary: A great conjunction across the looped sky, as the Downside bends back to bring this end to its distant beginning.
Relationships: Oralech & Soliam Murr, Oralech/Volfred Sandalwood, Volfred Sandalwood & Soliam Murr
Comments: 4
Kudos: 6
Collections: Past Imperfect Future Unknown 2020





	1. The cave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [azurefishnets](https://archiveofourown.org/users/azurefishnets/gifts).



“Enough! You don’t have to fix my anger, Volfred. Enough fixing. You’ve had decades of fixing. Aren’t you happy with your Union?”

“Aren’t you?” Volfred asked, twirling his beard. It was their Union, of course, their shared dream, even if they could not live in it and no matter how much Oralech treated it like a divorcee’s child whenever he was in a foul mood. Which was not often, these days. Their travels through the Downside were peaceful enough, year after year.

“You are impossible.”

Volfred hummed a _why, thank you_. He tried his best. Anything less and they may grow bored of each other, he suspected, never a fan of mediocrity nor of people who appreciated it themselves. Of course asking either of them to act anything less than grandiosely would have been akin to asking an imp to go vegetarian, never to even look at a fish again in its long and hungry life, so by his calculations, they were doing alright.

He quickened his pace as they went deep into a web of canyons, the latest uncharted stretch of the horizon they had deemed to cover in their aimless journeys.

“Oralech.”

Oralech grunted in acknowledgement.

“I want you to know, to really know, that I am sorry.”

“Here’s one for the papers,” he said, but Volfred could see that he was grinning a little, and given that Volfred was the reason they had newspapers in the Downside to begin with, or up in the Union for that matter, his keen political instincts told him that the choice of words meant the big guy was conceding. Not that he needed to.

“No, I mean it. You’re right, you’re right – the Scribes are gone.” A statement which, for Volfred, was the full stop at the end of a long and painful meditation on decaying plans and values, the unattainability of a stable utopia, fallible heroes, the terrifying width of possibilities at the end of a preordained path.

“Good riddance.” For Oralech, celestial scapegoat, it was a blessing. So many years later, his anger at the end of the Rites still gnawed at his bones. After a poignant pause, he added: “I like you better.”

“You won’t mind, of course, if I do not shoot down this statement in a prudish display of modesty.”

“Ha! Let no demon in the Downside stand between you and a compliment. Certainly not I.”

Volfred reached for his hand. His favorite demon carefully closed his claws around the tender wood, blackened nails clinking against rings and bracelets. Of all their dreams, of all the ones that had come true, the one they were living in was the one where they grew old together. Go figure.

They kept pushing East as the sun set past the high canyon ridges. Oralech, who as a rule was perfectly content to let his companion speak for two, found it within himself to tell a story from his time with Gareph and Iqsa, one of the oddities and miracles they witnessed as they wandered far from the beaten paths of the Downside, before they found the garments and insignia they came to call the True Nightwings (still not sorry for that, by the way). The clean sharp air of that faraway day, with its ghosts and its row of distant fires, faded into the present as the tale wrapped. The evening painted the bare cliffs with a faint purple hue; above them, the sky was still glowing with a suspended light, a state of affairs that would not hold for long. Night fell hard and fast in the Downside.

The imps had told them, in so many squawks and screeches, of a cave where colonies sometimes spent the summers; at last Oralech, whom necessity had endowed with a strong sense of direction, found its entrance and helped Volfred raise his roots across the rocks that blocked most of it. They made camp.

Volfred could not sleep. They lay wrapped in their pillows and blankets, root socks and horn supports all accounted for. Volfred almost disappeared in the awkward clutch of Oralech’s arms, a habit they had picked up to make up for lost time and to underscore a point to the world rather than for sharing warmth, since neither saps nor demons had much to offer in that department, nor thankfully suffered the cold much.

At one point, he could have sworn that there were words coming from deep within the cave. Not any common words, either, and certainly not frantic imp-speech (besides, it was not summer). In the absolute silence of the canyons at night, where in the absence of wind a drop of water could be heard falling into a subterranean lake a mile underneath, Volfred was hearing the distant call of the stars he used to follow as the Reader of the Nightwings. Those stars were gone, faded into irrelevance after Oralech had filled the sky with the pain their injustice had wrought upon him. But they had been a good guide. Their memory still was. He placed a kiss on Oralech’s chest, as an oblique excuse for wanting to follow that call again, and carefully disentangled himself from the demon’s embrace to go investigate its source.

As the starless, moonless night outside had given up on even the faintest spark of light (moonlight hit differently these days, anyway, or so it felt like staring at the dull, lifeless satellite orbiting the sky, so no losses there), Volfred saw an echo of a glow come from behind a rock protrusion near the back of the cave. A large natural corridor they had not seen earlier led further inside, filled with a warm, delicate light that hummed in the sap’s ears.

He had not been called to traverse that tunnel, he would later insist. Certainly not enchanted, this he could say with the certainty afforded by the habit of keeping his thoughts on a strict leash and, occasionally, other people’s as well. His mind had been his own and he did not believe in any sort of destiny people could not build with their own hands, paws, tails and talons. (If, for the sake of argument, such a destiny existed, one could only conclude that it had used him as a tool to get at Oralech, and Volfred would take such conjecture to his grave rather than burdening his partner with it).

At the end of a linear series of grottos stood a wider hall, where laces of long-dead stalactites and stalagmites had joined near the center to form a wondrous column. Still water rested in ponds at its bottom, reflecting the blue flame that towered above them, twisting in the air, whispering promises of purification, enlightenment and freedom within its deep red core. The air was thick with magic. Speechless for once, Volfred sat down on the nearest pond to contemplate this miracle and eventually raised his hand toward the flame, aching to get ever closer, taken by a deep melancholy. The voices were so loud.

Oralech woke up alone, some remote part of his brain alarmed by the fact that the blanket had not been thoroughly hogged off his body yet. He jumped to alertness. Before he allowed himself to even acknowledge the mounting panic in his throat (Volfred wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He didn’t abandon him then, he wouldn’t now. There was a sensible explanation for this, there was a sensible explanation for the way that sap sneezed, C. Volfred Sandalwood was nothing if not a bunch of sensible explanations in fashionable clothes), he stomped in defiance to anyone who might’ve been listening, lit their lantern and followed the deep root marks on the ground into the tunnel, the grottos, eventually to the column’s hall. The blue flame burned bright and impossible, taunting him. Volfred lay sprawled underneath the wretched beguiling thing, his arm outstretched – sleeping soundly, as peaceful as anyone had ever seen him, his chest safely moving up and down. Oralech hastened to lift him, to carry him back to the safety of the entrance and their belongings, but when he came closer, he found, against his better judgment, that he could not draw his eyes away from the blue light. Careful not to get soaked in the ponds, he sat down next to Volfred, keeping a claw protectively wrapped around the sap’s thigh, and snarled at the flame as his eyelids felt heavier and heavier.

Their dreams, too, were heavy. They woke up in the deep darkness that fills the depths of the earth, the kind that is filled with its own sacrality and stands as a mirror for wonder and imagination, but does not pulse with magic, not in the least. The flame was gone. They both felt its absence in their guts.

“You alive?”  
“Where did it...” Volfred could feel a headache split his head wider than the fall downriver ever managed to, but pulled himself together quickly enough to remember what gratitude looked like. “...you came for me. Thank you.”

He sat closer to Oralech, feeling the comforting mass of the demon exist next to him in the darkness. Oralech may not have been too thrilled about a watered sap closing in, but he searched for his face with affectionate touches until he was sure he could lean in and steal a kiss in the dark without any horn accidents. It was a learned skill.

“So,” Oralech wondered after a while. “What happened.”

“I don’t know,” said Volfred without caring to hide the slight thrill in his voice at the sheer novelty of not having the faintest clue of what was going on.

“Nonetheless. I expect a sensible explanation.”

“Ah. I expect I owe you one. Simple as the truth is, it is not easy to convey, I’m afraid. I couldn’t sleep.”

“You don’t sleep every other night. Not enough interwoven schemes to keep you busy?”

“The stars were speaking again.”

Oralech waited for him to continue.

“Through the flame. You saw the flame, I imagine.”

“I did.”

“It was beautiful.”

“After a fashion.”

“It was to me. But no matter how close I came, no matter how deafeningly they whispered in my ears, I could not make out what they were saying. You’ll understand, I didn’t want you to have to listen... I know you are happier having cast the Scribes aside. So, I made a call. I would’ve told you about it later, I think.”

“Love you too.” He smelled the air. “Do you think it’s dawn?”

Hand in hand, they felt their way through the stone, back through the corridor and eventually the entrance, where they found that their belongings had been stolen and the thorough thief had made the effort to scrub their footsteps or trail from the scene of the crime. And, for that matter, Oralech’s footsteps and Volfred’s trail as well. The thin layer of soil seemed untouched.

It was, indeed, dawn, the very beginning of it, as the first sun rays pushed against deep blue and the brightest stars still shone. Volfred stared, transfixed, at a small spire which rose past the entrance, on the other side of the canyon. Had it been there when they walked in? Obviously, it went to show that observation is limited and conditional. His roots longed for the comfort of the deep earth. He burrowed down as little as he could.

Oralech’s voice came as if through a haze: “Look. The seventh jester.”

The words reached his aching head and passed through it like a sieve. There was something important he was not retaining, something that was dragging his attention lower and lower.

“Look. I was barely a Reader. But I saw enough literate folks trace their routes for the Nightwings to remember what the damned sky looked like. Volfred!”

With considerable effort, he looked: there was the familiar void where the Bog Star used to be, but what a crown surrounded it: what else could they be but the entwined fates of Piscer, Casius and Sagithol, not faded, not beaten, not torn and eaten by the titans’ echoes, brighter now than they had ever been, alive and resplendent.

And then it came to him, in a shiver, what his roots were saying. He repeated it out loud, to check it against this cold new morning:

“The earth is young.”

It bore out.


	2. The amphitheater

Their tracks outside the cave did not exist yet. The canyons were pristine. They hurried in the direction they thought they’d come from, where they knew that food and water, if not shelter, would be within a few hours’ walking distance. Any other consideration would have to wait.

Just past a natural crossroads, if they hadn’t taken a wrong turn, the impassable walls of stone around them would open into a natural amphitheater, where, at a point in time that may or may not have come into being yet, flat boulders had fallen as if to mark the position of an orator and their public (since old habits die hard, on their way there Volfred had stood on the orator’s boulder to deliver a playful and moving address to his crowd of one).

They reached the crossroads. The sun still hadn’t peeked past the ridges. A deep voice, a demon’s, came from the direction of the amphitheater, carried by a breeze:

“For this I swear,” said the voice in the old tongue: “that in the sky I shall turn toward you, holding out my rays like outstretched fingers to brush your hands once again and for as long as our hearts will burn...”

“What if,” said another, rich, commanding, not as deep (adoring, picked up Oralech, who did not catch all the words but had a fair grasp on that sort of tone), “we should sit at the opposite ends of the sky? If you were the Northern compass, and I the basis to the South?”

The first voice seemed to give some consideration to the possibility. “Then the whole world would be inscribed in our embrace.”

Back at the crossroads, Volfred raised an appreciative eyebrow.

“Take notes,” teased him Oralech in the lowest whisper allowed to a demon.

“Me? I’ll let you know, I can improvise quite proficiently, thank you.”

“And I can’t write, so, suit yourself.”

As a matter of fact, he could, and in a different situation Volfred would not have let him get away with it, but the impossible voice spoke up again, commanding their attention. And it was that inherent quality, even more than the words it was uttering or the differences in the sky, that made them suspect the magnitude of the portent that had brought them there. Not just a door to the past, but a connection. Volfred stared at Oralech, who saw he was being observed, fell into step with the complexity of his emotions on the matter and clenched his fists.

“Will you go fetch the others? Please?” asked the voice. Volfred could not imagine any mortal hearing this request and gathering the willpower to say no. “With a sky so clear,” it continued, “it befits us all to meditate together upon Geminian and her retinue, until the moment they disappear into the dawning day.”

“My emperor.” The love in that epithet had gone from distant deference to the most intimate companionship and ended up full circle, encompassing the whole breadth of lives spent side by side.

They heard armored boots walk away, and it must have been the strange acoustics of the place that made a legion’s footsteps echo behind them.

Volfred pinched the bridge of his nose. A memory of the flame still danced inside his head, the stars still whispered, no, wrote their words all across this moment in space and time, for a capable Reader to observe and learn.

But what stars? The absence of vernal Lu burned a bright hole through the zenith. What stars?

When he came to terms with the fact that his splitting headache was not going anywhere before it made firewood out of him and opened his eyes again, he saw Oralech half way to the amphitheater, marching forward with a resolute step.

Soliam Murr, last of his name, rose from his stone seat to face the newcomer. The white-haired demon bore the horns of a long exile and carried himself with the air of someone who had been forced into shackles and cast them aside. Like a king’s heavy mantle, behind him trailed a weave of wrongs and endings, curses so deep they polluted the soil. To the Emperor’s eyes, the person almost disappeared under the symbols he carried with him: a herald of doom. For perhaps the first time since the Archbeast Sung-Gries was felled, he felt a jolt of fear course through his blood, facing the suffocating dread of finality. Soliam held in his arms the first manuscript of the Book of Rites, which held all the Eight’s hopes for a fairer future. He would not allow an ending to come for their fledgling dream, so in acknowledging the visitor, he lowered his horns in the way that was being established between demons in the Downside to be a defensive salutation, expecting the other party to state their name and intent lest it be considered an aggression.

“Figures,” spat the stranger in an unknown tongue and stomped his hoof in anger.

Volfred could swear he had seen this confrontation play out a thousand times over in his dreams. Oralech about to fall; Volfred petrified in place at the end of a moment that spread through centuries, unable to reach out, to shield him, to even ask for forgiveness as he slipped through his fingers. Did the stars whisper then?

“We come in peace!” he cried out in old Sahrian. “Please, sir. Please. Stay your hand! We’re peaceful.”

Oralech shook his head and turned to look at him with a strange understanding, like his long dream, too, was crashing against a different reality at last. Then Soliam Murr raised a hand and the world went dark.

Ashamed by the fear he’d allowed to take hold in him and still feeling unsettled, so far away from his rigorous state of contemplation, the emperor reached out to these strange visitors through the truth of Reading, where lies were pointless and distant languages could meet in the middle. Accustomed to the unshakable monuments that were the superb intellects of his peers, looming up against the bare eldritch landscape of the slain titans, the most delicate touch of his mind pushed through the strangers’ like wind through a sieve. Like wind, it caught traces of faraway lands – of faraway times, glimpses of lives beyond the end. Soliam shivered.

The sap Volfred Sandalwood was himself a Reader and tried to erect a blockade, as Readers do as a manner of studying each other. Those feeble barriers scattered in the darkness. It surprised Soliam, then, to find that past those pretenses, the sap’s mind was open, even eager to connect, to shift and make place for his own. He could not shake the impression that in the presence of wondrous power far beyond any mortal’s, Sandalwood was, somehow, taking stock. The sap also knew the Scribes, inasmuch as people can know each other across eight centuries (present irony notwithstanding) and held deep within his heart the writings of the Book whose ink was barely dry in Soliam’s hands. He opened his life to Soliam’s mind as a history of dark times and cycles coming to a close, so far beyond the Book’s provisions, yet clinging throughout two centuries to its principles of mercy and freedom so that others could be better, so that a just framework could be set for their lives. New freedoms for a new age, freedom born out of the miserable centuries that forced him to live in fear, always hiding, keeping up pretenses, moving in the shadows, pushing through the pain of a loss so unjust it shook the skies.

 _I believe I did alright_ , he said at last as his life lay bare.

_Is that so. Did we not say something about modesty in that book of ours?_

_Chapter seven, page eight, if memory serves._

Soliam Murr laughed.

But when he shifted his full attention toward the demon Oralech, the latter’s composure stiffened like steel. He built his resentment like a barrier – a child’s first sand castle on the shore, sure, but solemn, full of intent, no less serious for its lack of materials and technique. Soliam Murr had come to feel the communion of all life as far as his eyes could see and what this one individual was saying was: _go away_.

So he did.

And they were back in the stone amphitheater, playing their parts across the ends of time.


	3. Rites of flame

“Are you Soliam Murr?” said Oralech in stilted Sahrian, holding onto his scars like a weapon. The question was, for the most part, rhetorical, but Volfred at least picked up on the corollary that his pride could not have survived another case of misaimed anger.

“Yes, I am,” replied Soliam, articulating each word properly as a form of courtesy.

No doubts, then: here was the founder of the system that saw him betrayed and discarded, the origin of the rage that had been boiling in his flesh for so long, dwindled to a deep rumble now but never, ever sated.

“Your plan is awful.”

“All plans are, in the end.”

“We,” Oralech said, and took a step toward Volfred, “built a better society than you could have ever imagined.”

“Ah. And what feelings, tell, do you believe your words incited within me?”

“I do not care.”

“I am thankful, Oralech.”

“...I do not care.”

“Nonetheless, hear this in turn: not even stars are eternal. We humbly pave the way for generations to come; eventually, we pass the torch in the dark, like the First Empress did to the last, and the cycle begins anew. We, the Eight, have seen the turning of the stars from now until the ending of our age. This we wrote in our Book as an apology to those who would live in that sorrowful threshold, for ages end in pain.”

“You could have done better.”

“We could have, indeed.”

“You let the Rites betray me.”

“Once, in eight hundred years.”

“Didn’t hurt any less.”

“We could not avoid it, so far beyond anyone’s grasp.”

Volfred shuffled in shame. His inaction as Erisa leapt would haunt him to his last day. The others did not seem to pay attention.

“What was within our power to dictate,” continued Soliam, “was to say: the Rites are an act of mercy. Should that cease to hold true, so shall the Rites. A small reparation. Would it that it could have been more. I am sorry.”

Something cracked within Oralech, then. Oh, of course the great mastermind currently making a face to his left had posited it, that the True Nightwings’ appearance had ushered into the end of the Rites as a cosmic acknowledgment that the system had been broken beyond repair. Such optimism had felt like a feel-good bedtime story fit for a small child. When the Gate Guardian herself told you to your face that it was your fault the world was coming undone, those words tended to stick, and sear the kind of wound his talents as a doctor could not begin to treat. “What did you _do_ ,” even Volfred had asked him, although at least he’d had the decency to believe him when he answered that his greatest act of insubordination had been to keep on living after being murdered.

Now the distant architect of his fall was telling him that the ruination that surrounded him was a badge of honor, a misguided settlement of sorts. He felt his knees go weak.

“You… are?

“Past our lot in history, through such darkness, it was beyond our power to reach out a hand and find you, not out of pity, although that too has its place and time, but rather devotion. We did not know who you would be, only that you would come along in the end. End. A word I still loathe to consider, for you and for my life’s work. It has been our wish, and here at the beginning of all things against all sense I find it granted, to at least tell you that we are sorry. Would it that we could have told you in your time that a perfect world would see no betrayals, yet this fallible hodgepodge is the one we are tasked with improving, and we are sorry.”

What was worst, he meant every word of it. Oralech was watching the Demon Scribe’s expression and found nothing but clear intent within. Clear enough, in fact, that if he looked deep enough he could find regret for being the last broken link on the chain of Geminian’s legacy, and searching past even that he could see history from outside in, staring at the future of their own Union as it ultimately went down in flames to make way for something new, something better, and what would Oralech say to the people of those times, betrayed by their principles?

It takes a special kind of stubborn to walk up to repentance incarnate and hope to get anything other than empathy out of that confrontation. Come to think of it, what _did_ he want to get out of it? The last emperor stood before him, facing him and Volfred and the stones which made up the public of the amphitheater, and the scores of people in the new Commonwealth who would be cast down and liberated again holding a new kind of freedom. The weight of all those destinies had chiseled his features and afforded him a new grace. Oralech wondered, briefly, what he and Volfred would look like if they had been able to follow the Union’s foundation and its government. Their kind of freedom had taken a strange turn.

“Please,” Soliam said again. “Allow me this honor. We who have lived through an ending.”

He offered his hand. Oralech hesitated, nails digging into his palm. The tender touch of Volfred’s thoughts supported him as he unclenched his claws, rolled his shoulders and tentatively accepted that communion.

Volfred backed out as their thoughts met and looked away, out of some ill-defined concept of privateness. That moment was not for him (although he would ask, later, as his aforementioned definition of privateness included the words “something that ultimately happens to other people”). Besides, that’s the thing with astronomy: with enough foreknowledge, you can be certain that a conjunction is taking place even when you are not looking at it. He wondered whether that meeting was the gravitational pull that had led them there, a call stronger than time itself.

As he stared into the distance, he saw a group come into focus, emerging from the morning mist: a man wearing the tall helm of the Legion, with an imp on his shoulder, ushered cur and sap, harp, bog and wyrm, walking, slithering, hovering forward in an aura of glory. Two hazy figures closed the procession, plucking chords out of their instruments. If their companions were more present than reality, standing out against the landscape like sculpted figures on painted background, the pair seemed to fade into it, uncertain if not for their music, which rang clear through the canyons.

Volfred’s heart skipped a beat.

“Ah, friend Soliam!” greeted the Underking, darting ahead and coming to a halt in a gallant salute. “A good day to you, comrade in arms. And to you, exiles. Are these perchance volunteers you have found for our Nightwings triumvirate? An audacious ploy, this one thinks. ‘tis not easy to find folks who shall agree to play the villain.”

The others seemed to take stock of their presence for the first time. Soliam too looked at them with new eyes, going beyond their respective roles in history. In a way, they themselves saw now that their connection with the Demon Scribe was not a fleeting sorcery or whimsical dream, but that they existed then and there, in the flesh, exiled through time now as well. Volfred wanted to believe that a secret flame already burned somewhere, hidden in that young world, but until they found it, or if he’d already wagered too much optimism for a lifetime and no doors to the future existed in this land of miracles, they would need to make a life for themselves. Volfred reached out for Oralech’s hand.

“Stars watch upon you, Ores, and you my friends and dearest companions” said Soliam, amusement flashing over his somber countenance. “Your intuition guides you well! Let it be known that these exiles have shown, in our talks, to possess a deep-seated, intrinsic grasp of the underlying precepts of the Rites.” Oralech snorted.

With utmost grace, Soliam turned toward them.

“The choice, however, remains their own.”

The full reality of the situation loomed overhead and would eventually catch up with Volfred like a boulder from the ridges above, but the exhilarating thing was that it hadn’t yet. Or, rather: Scribes and Heralds standing before them were real and tangible, and now the path of the Rites unfolded before them once again in its thrilling clarity and everything was new and just and full of potential. There were certainly so many sensible considerations to be voiced, but in that moment, they all crumbled down to trifles in the face of sheer wonder.

“Were we not aimless when this journey started? Why not follow irony, for a change,” ventured Volfred.

“...I am not committing to anything. I could show the rookies some tricks.”

“Love, you always did look good in blue...”


End file.
